


Seven Things

by lorannah



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:53:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorannah/pseuds/lorannah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a quick look at Jack and Ianto's relationship - no plot, no dialogue, just thoughts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Things

**ONE.**

Ianto had started carrying the stopwatch in his pocket after Jack disappeared. Although only partly because it had belonged to Jack once. It wasn’t as if it had been given to him as a gift, something to treasure and hold and keep near – it had been given to him to get rid of after they’d broken it.

Instead he’d kept it and fixed it – not in some maudlin desire for a memento – but because he liked fixing things.

It was a skill he had worked on compulsively as a child. His mother had been ill and his father had been busy and so he’d learned to fix the things that needed fixing in the house. Those that were tangible.

So he kept the stopwatch in his pocket, because he liked the weight of it – he liked that it reminded him of his childhood, of a time when some things were still fixable and that, yes, it reminded him of Jack.

And partly it was because he simply liked the stopwatch – its mechanism and nature, like clockwork – there was something very controlled about a stopwatch.

* * * * *

Jack hadn’t even known that Ianto had kept the stopwatch until he’d pulled it out of his pocket with a flourish, a quip and a grin – and at the time there had been too much happening for him to take it in.

Later on it made him smile.

Jack also hadn’t noticed at first that the Doctor had managed to drop him back in Cardiff almost a year after he first left. The Tardis was clearly a tricky thing. Of course this meant that he had a lot more apologising to do than he’d thought.

The stopwatch was a sign, he hoped, that Ianto hadn’t completely given up on him while he was gone. He liked it.

Plus it just seemed to suit him – it fitted his old fashioned, gentlemanly nature. The upright, controlled, tightly coiled Ianto Jones.

That was the first thing most people noticed about Ianto – his neatness. Everything around him was ordered and tidy. He even ate neatly.

Jack remembered the first time he had seen him, the day after the battle of CanaryWharf when he was confronted with a handful of shattered, stunned survivors. Most of them still dishevelled and dusty and there was Ianto, dressed impeccably in a suit.

* * * * * *

**TWO.**

Ianto supposed that his need for tidiness stemmed from his mother’s illness, the need to keep everything in order – her pills and the house. It had become engrained.

He knew that it sometimes bordered on being an OCD, but that was generally something that didn’t concern him. It was something he could use. It was useful.

There had been a time, just after she died, when it had perhaps crossed the line – become a worry. With the order and strict regimentation of her daily life gone, he’d absorbed himself in everyday tasks – small rituals.

He’d begun to organise his wardrobe, everything ironed and pressed and colour coded. He started to obsessively check that it was right, at his worst; he’d been sorting it two or three times an hour.

Then Torchwood had come and given him other ways to fill his life.

He’d never completely shaken the habits, but the obsessiveness was gone.

* * * * *

Perhaps Ianto’s never-ending neatness way the reason that Jack loved his handwriting so much.

It wasn’t that it was simply messy – it skipped across the page in jumps and starts, changing every few lines as if his hand had been unable to keep up with his brain. It was like seeing a small glimpse of Ianto unmasked.

* * * * *

**   
**

**THREE.**

One of the hardest decisions Ianto had ever made, before Torchwood had complicated everything, was to leave college before the end of his A-levels. It wasn’t a decision he’d hesitated over, his mother had been at her worst and his father had been falling apart and he’d known where his responsibilities lay – but it had been hard, because learning was something he’d valued.

That moment had told him a lot about himself. Although mostly it had highlighted things he already knew.

It was why he’d always struggled with relationships, he’d experimented like any other teenager, but when it came down to it his responsibilities had always come first and most people aren’t happy with being second best.

* * * * *

It had been almost sinfully easy for Jack to fall into a relationship with Ianto. Because the inconsistencies of his writing had never been reflected elsewhere – he had been steady and reliable and responsible.

Jack had always trusted, after everything that had happened with Lisa, that Ianto would choose the right thing. That he’d choose Torchwood over Jack. So he’d never even worried about them falling in love – or at least not at first.

It had just been a way for the two of them to help each other.

He’d always let Ianto drive the relationship – push it where he wanted. Because he’d known that he was attracted to him and that Ianto was damaged and that it would be all to easy to take what he wanted without thinking – he supposed in the end he’d done that anyway.

He wasn’t sure when he’d stopped being attracted to the steadiness and started seeing everything else. Perhaps that had never been the real attraction in the first place – just a convenient, conscience-salving excuse.

* * * * *

 

**FOUR.**

There had only been once that Ianto’s sense of duty had been challenged – Lisa.

She’d helped to give him meaning as much as Torchwood. She’d been intelligent and outgoing and so competent that sometimes it had hurt. And she’d still needed him to look after her, because she just didn’t think of the little things.

It wasn’t even that he’d made the wrong choice; it was that he’d been completely unable to make a choice.

It had felt like drowning.

* * * * *

Jack thought now that maybe what had really attracted him was Ianto’s innocence. His complete faith in humanity.

He’d seen him crouched beside the bodies in the hub, after what Lisa had done, and seen a man completely unable to kill.

He supposed now, faced with a desperate situation that Ianto would do it – but he always tried to shoot to hurt instead and mostly he only carried a stun gun.

It had been a relief when he’d come back to them, to see Ianto – faced with the blowfish – hesitate. Because it had meant that he was still Ianto, pure and unspoiled by Jack’s betrayal. Or by Torchwood.

It was so different from John who would kill in a heartbeat or the Doctor who would kill through necessity.

And it was certainly different from Jack himself. He knew he was the eternal soldier – every battle he had come across he’d slid effortlessly into the role – there was no other way to define him.

But it wasn’t something he had to like. He’d done a lot of things he wasn’t proud of.

* * * * *

 

**FIVE.**

 

Ianto knew that what had happened at Canary Wharf and then with Lisa had broken him, damaged him in some way – made him a lesser man.

He believed with a certainty that before everything had happened he would have shot the blowfish without hesitation – wouldn’t have had that moments doubt that he could do it, wouldn’t have looked for another solution.

It was something Lisa had always chided him about. His soft heart. He didn’t see the hypocrisy in those facts.

He felt useless in the field now – weak – but Jack was helping him. In their secretive nights together, he was training him. Or re-training him perhaps was the word. Rebuilding him.

Ianto knew that he was starting to mimic Jack’s fighting style - upright, controlled, tightly coiled.

* * * * *

Ianto’s was reserved and secretive and that had also appealed to Jack – it was what he looked for in those relationships that mattered – the way he himself behaved. The flirting and bravado was mostly bluster – left-over from his time as a con man. Ways to distract and fool and form connections.

When he was in love, he preferred to keep it to himself. A private joy.

And it made life easier. For him.

He was aware of the hypocrisy when he chided Gwen about Rhys and this way he didn’t have to face the questions and accusations. It made everything easier.

But he had faltered for a moment, his heart twisting when he found the real Ianto Jones. His private self – open and vulnerable and utterly trusting. It should have made Jack stay away, seeing him so laid bare and so easy to hurt.

Instead it was why he stayed. It made things harder.

*** * * * ***

 

**SIX.**

Those secret nights with Jack meant more to Ianto than he cared to admit. As Jack traced the line of his neck or the shape of his hip. Even as he was training him, his fingers would trace the set of Ianto’s shoulders. A detailed study.

Few people had paid Ianto attention like that; he was more used to giving attention than receiving it.

It was a world away from Yvonne’s calculated interest or the careless disinterest everyone at Torchwood Three had shown him when he first arrived. Even back then, when he’d been tied to his pain and Lisa’s, he’d known that he wanted Jack to notice him.

It made him feel like somebody was finally there to take care of him.

He had no disillusions about their relationship – part of him knew that he was just convenient – he didn’t expect it to last forever, most days he didn’t even expect it to last the month. But sometimes when they were alone, it was easy to imagine.

* * * * *

It had been a surprise to Jack, the night before they had sent Tommy back, to look up as he was talking to Ianto and see that he couldn’t bear to look at him, that he was just staring at the desk. His face hurting, closing in on itself.

And then Jack had known. Ianto didn’t think he was loved and he’d realised that he’d been too secretive about his feelings by far. That he’d even hidden them from Ianto. That had hurt

And it was easy, as he watched Gwen rush out of her hiding place to save Rhys, to resent her a little. Because for her there were such easy ways to show that she loved him – her stupidity and foolishness was evidence of how much she cared. Endless effortless confirmations.

And Jack knew he could never do that for Ianto.

* * * * *

**SEVEN.**

But Ianto was also, foremost, a watcher. A childhood spent studying the minutiae of his mother’s smile – her secret pain and unspoken needs, had trained him well.

He’d seen the darkness in Jack first – and the pain it caused him every time he had to take the hopeless path. And when Jack came back he could see that something had changed.

He saw how, more and more, Jack threw himself in front of danger – not through careless confidence anymore, but out of desperation and fear. And he watched as Gwen gave her ultimatum and saw Jack cave. Collapse in front of them.

Jack couldn’t bear anymore to lose them. He couldn’t let go – and as much as Ianto wanted Jack to be there for him, he knew the importance of letting go.

And it hurts him, because Jack can’t die and one way or another they’ll all leave him eventually.

* * * * *

It scared Jack now, terrified him, how much he needed Ianto Jones. How much he cared for him, how he made his heart ache and his soul lift. It was getting harder every day, to send him and the others into the field.

He’d spent a year with the Doctor and Martha’s family, learning what it really meant to send someone you loved into danger. And it almost breaks him. But he knows that he can’t let that get in the way of the job that needs to be done.

So he had started to train Ianto to fight because he knows he can’t be there to save him.

It makes him hate himself a little, hates that he is corrupting Ianto – hates that he’s turning him into a loyal, little soldier.

**Author's Note:**

> My policy on permissions for use of my work is that you don't in fact need my permission to make art, record podfic, remix, critique, translate, save, share or otherwise reuse and interact with anything I've done. I'd love it if you'd share a link with me when you're done.
> 
> Any comments are also welcome – I'd love to hear what worked for you and (truly) what didn't or about those really obvious typos that my mind can't see anymore. If you don't want to comment publicly, feel free to e-mail me. Everything and anything will be loved and cherished.


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